stood a chance against two large men.
The authorities had another version
of what had happened in the riverbed.
The two women, both Hispanic, said
that they separated to let the Blazer pass
down the middle of the sandy channel
with no incident. The physical evidence,
police said, indicated that Bonilla had
advanced rather than retreated. Brunson
and Holt were carrying no weapons of
any kind. One bullet had hit Brunson
in the back, presumably as he was trying
to run. In the view of the county attor-
ney's office, Sam Bonilla had ended an
argument with a gun. He was charged
with second-degree murder in the death
of Steven Holt and second-degree at-
tempted murder in the wounding of
Tanner Brunson. He was locked up in
the Ford County jail.
I n 1995, Rebecca Escalante arrived in
Dodge City from Texas with a
bunch of children, a high energy level,
and no more patience for a difficult
marriage. She worked at a construction
company, weighing trucks. She worked
in a lawyer's office. She worked as a
court interpreter-although, as a sec-
ond-generation Mexican-American,
she had to brush up on her Spanish to
do that. She did people's taxes. She
worked for a bail bondsman. Eventu-
ally, she started her own bail-bond
business. She is now the proprietor of
Becky's Bail Bonds and Tax Service,
and she owns the building her office is
in. One of the people who worked part
time for her, chasing down bail jump-
ers, was Sam Bonilla. One of the peo-
ple she had bailed out ofFord County
jail was Steven Holt, who, like Tanner
Brunson, had a tendency to get into
scrapes with the law over the posses-
sion of marijuana and the operation of
motor vehicles. In Dodge City, Esca-
lante had found Hispanics to be con-
siderably less assertive than what she
had been accustomed to in Texas-
partly, presumably, because many of
them are undocumented. "The major-
ity of the people here are looking af-
ter themselves and their families," she
has said. "If it doesn't have anything
to do with them, they don't want the
exposure." Hispanics in Dodge have
been reluctant to protest mistreat-
ment and are barely engaged with the
political life of the city. There is one
Hispanic on the school board, none on
the city commission. Of the fifty
officers on the police force, three speak
Spanish.
"In a sense, we have two communi-
ties," Jim Sherer, a former mayor who
is one of the people encouraging His-
panics to participate in the life of the
city, said recently. (There is actually a
small start on a third: on the blocks of
Front Street that have been tricked out
with wooden overhangs to suggest the
Old West, one of the stores is anMri-
can grocery, serving the needs of some
Somalis who moved to Dodge City
after the closing of a packing plant in
Emporia two years ago.) "Sometimes
I feel out of place," Escalante has said,
"but sometimes when I go back to
Texas I say, 'I like it in Kansas. I like
the challenge.'" As part of the chal-
lenge, she tries to stay active in civic
life; in 2008, she even ran (unsuccess-
fully) for state representative. She is the
president of the Dodge City Kiwanis
Club. She speaks up when she thinks
a Hispanic is being treated unfairly-
which is what she thought was hap-
pening to Sam Bonilla. As the person
Bonilla had designated to handle his
bond, she had access to him in the Ford
County jail. On one visit, a few weeks
after his arrest, she took Claire O'Brien,
a reporter with the Dodge City Daily
Globe, with her.
Claire O'Brien was not the regular
crime reporter on the Daily Globe. She
had come to the Globe six months ear-
lier as an education reporter, after losing
her job in some layoffs at the Freeport,
Illinois,Journal-Standard. A woman in
her fifties with a nervous manner, she
had an unusual background for a re-
porter on a small-city Kansas daily: she
had done graduate work in history, and,
in her twenties, she had played drums in
an all-female punk-rock band in San
Francisco. Like Rebecca Escalante, she
found the Hispanics of Dodge City
much more deferential than Hispanics
in other places she had lived. ("I felt that
1'd stepped back in time.") The story
that resulted from her visit to the Ford
County jail appeared on the front page
of the Globe on October 13,2009. It in-
cluded extensive quotes presenting Bo-
nillà s contention that he acted in self-
defense while in peril for his life. It
reported that in Bonillà s view a His-
panic could not get a fair trial in Ford
County. In the lead paragraph, it said
that Rebecca Escalante had decided not
to post bond for Bonilla because she was
concerned about his safety. According
to an unnamed source, O'Brien wrote,
Tanner Brunson "has a base of support
that is well-known for its anti-Hispanic
beliefs. The same source stated he has
seen evidence that Brunson's support
base has a supply of semi-automatic
"
weapons.
The Globe article was an astonish-
ing, perhaps unprecedented event in
Dodge City. Ordinarily, the crime
reporting of newspapers with small
staffs-and many of those with large
staffs-reflects their need for coöpera-
tion from the police and the prosecu-
tor. "Prosecutors hate jailhouse inter-
views," Doug Anstaett, the executive
director of the Kansas Press Associa-
tion, has said. "They really hate the fact
that a reporter has jumped in between
them and the system." Here was a re-
porter who, having been more or less
sneaked into the jail, published an arti-
cle that presented the defendant's side
of the story. (Not "trying the case in the
press" usually has the effect, intended
or not, of letting the police depart-
ment's version of events stand until the
trial.) It also raised the question of
whether a fair trial was possible. It even
implied that the defendant wouldn't be
safe in the jurisdiction if he exercised
his right to request bond.
The prosecutor in question, County
Attorney Terry Malone, doesn't deny
that he considered the article an affront.
It reminded him, he said not long ago,
of that scene in the film "Hoosiers," in
which a local booster, having been
treated with what he thought was dis-
respect by the brand-new basketball
coach, says, "There's two kinds of
dumb. Guy that gets naked and runs
out in the snow and barks at the moon,
and, uh, guy who does the same thing
in my living room. First one don't mat-
ter, the second one you're kind of forced
to deal with." The way Malone dealt
with it was to subpoena both Claire
O'Brien and Rebecca Escalante-de-
manding that they reveal any anony-
mous sources, that O'Brien hand over
the notes she had made in her jailhouse
interview, and that both of them testify
in a closed-door proceeding that in
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 10, 2010 33